3 ms·
This is a funny rephrasing of "systems thinking". Donella Meadows, stocks and flows, etc. When you introduce a delay into adjusting flows, oscillations happen
by tunesmith 12y ago
This is a funny rephrasing of "systems thinking". Donella Meadows, stocks and flows, etc. When you introduce a delay into adjusting flows, oscillations happen. The classic example is the shower faucet when the hot water heater is too far away from the spigot - you find yourself making it too hot, then too cold, etc.
- antsar 12y ago[OT/Pedantry] The shower faucet thing is caused by a large distance between the spigot (where the hot/cold mixing happens) and the shower head, not between the water heater and spigot.
- tunesmith 12y agothanks, I'm better at systems thinking than plumbing. :)
- tjradcliffe 12y ago[Pedantry^2] Both effects are important on different timescales. When first starting a shower, the distance between the hot water tank and the spigot is what matters, and this tends to produce a long-period oscillation that manifests as just a single over-shoot at the start. Then there is a short-period oscillation due to the tap/spigot distance. The initial transient is still technically an "oscillation" in the sense it is described by the same mathematics, even though it's a one-off.